Link bait titles are a race to zero

18 October 2014

A couple of days ago I saw a mic.com article with the title “A European country is now offering free college education to Americans” but the only way to find out which country this was (Germany) was by clicking through to the actual page.

I understand that content sites make the bulk of their revenue through advertising but resorting to a link-bait approach seems like a terrible idea. It’s a shortsighted attempt that increases page views at the cost of insulting your audience and cheapening your effort that will not work as a sustainable strategy. Relying on headlines to generate traffic without any meaningful content is a great way to get to become a commodity. I hope that there are enough people out there that care about the content they’re producing and have a passionate audience that can be monetized based on quality of engagement rather than on quantity of page views. Otherwise we’ll all end up in a race to zero.